For some time now, the publishing industry has used computer systems to arrange text and pictures into formatted documents. The publishing industry commonly refers to the process these computer systems use to perform document formatting tasks as a "paste-up" process. The paste-up process consists of arranging text and pictures to fit on a page and conform to a specific page layout format.
These paste-up systems commonly act on text in either an ASCII-, DTP-, or word processor-specific format. This requires that a user either input the text to the paste-up system by an input device such as a keyboard or send a file of the text and pictures to the paste-up system. Thus, if a document containing text is scanned and digitized into data, before it can be in any useful format for a paste-up system, the document must be converted to ASCII, DTP, or word processor format.
To convert the scanned and digitized data to character data, a character recognition program is used. Various character recognition methods are well known in the art and include template matching and shape analysis programs. However, all known character recognition programs require extensive processing time and require large amounts of memory.
Common paste-up systems also require user-interaction to decide on the placement of certain areas of text or picture. During the run-time of a paste-up system, the system will typically, prompt a user to receive input as to the proper placement of an area of text or a picture. This has the obvious disadvantage of requiring an operator for the paste-up system and slowing down the system while input from the user is awaited for.